Close Books: Lock/Freeze old transactions (with Password?) (QMac)

schmatt · March 2023

I'm struggling with the fact that Quicken is not a double entry bookkeeping setup. It seems to cause all kinds of issues related to inadvertant transaction duplication/modification. It's super frustrating, because these issues will show up randomly and take hours to troubleshoot. Double entry completely solves these issues.

Having the ability to "close the books" for previous years would help lock all of that down without having to start a new file from scratch and lose the ability to look at all of your financial history combined.

I'm borderline thinking about switching to a different tool that support double entry for this simple fact. But Quicken is by far the best and most integrated personal finance tool. I'm very torn about this issue.

WenTi · June 2023

I have the same hope for Quicken's able to lock previous years' transactions & allow users to retrieve old data for report. Can Quicken do these?

jacobs · June 2023

Quicken is never going to be a true double-entry bookkeeping system. It aims to serve consumers tracking personal finances, not bookkeepers and accountants, and its structure and operation are deeply ingraine into the way the program works (and has always worked). I've used multiple double-entry accounting systems for work, and I understand their benefits, but can't see a personal finance program requiring users to post transactions, correct errors with reversing entries, etc.

That said, the idea of being able to close a year, thereby locking transactions prior to a specified date from changes, additions or deletions, makes sense to me. If that's really what you're looking for, I'd support this feature idea.

DavidABQ · June 2023

2007 Quicken for Mac had the capability of password protecting old transactions with a user defined date, so that transactions could not be changed without inputting a password. This would be helpful in the current Quicken for Mac, especially because you can inadvertently change past year transactions. Being that we no longer can save a file for a past year to "freeze" that year's data (i.e. once taxes are run, you no longer want to be able the change data) , it is even more critical to be able to have to input a password for changing a transaction before a given date.

Quicken Anja · June 2023

Hello @DavidABQ,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community with your request.

Your idea has been merged into this already active Idea thread regarding the same request.

Thank you!

WenTi · June 2023

Thanks to DavidABQ, it sure is a good solution to my question.

Also, I need more bookkeeping knowledge to understand Jacobs's suggestions, but thanks anyway.

ddochter · May 2024

I too support the idea of locking down prior "closed" accounting petiods (i.e. at a minimum ... Annually...).

How can I vote for a feature / idea?

Is there a formal submission tool / process?

jacobs · May 2024

How can I vote for a feature / idea? Is there a formal submission tool / process?

This thread is an "idea" thread, because it's in the "Ideas for Mac Classic" section of the forum. If you scroll up to the top of the thread, you'll see that an Idea thread has a yellow box under the first post. In that box, there's a counter for votes. Click the dark gray arrow under the counter to add your vote; you'll see the vote count increment, and the arrow will change to a light gray to signify that you've voted for the Idea. Also in the yellow box is where you'll see the status of the feature request.

Currently the status for this feature says "Reviewed", which simply means the moderators have determined it doesn't overlap with another such thread or doesn't already exist. If/when the topic gets up to 30 votes, the status will change to "Under Consideration" and the thread will be forwarded to the Mac development team. They will assess whether they think it's a useful and a viable feature, and will have someone do work to analyze the scope of the work required, including number of days and which specific developers are needed. If they agree to implement the feature, they then need to find a slot on their planning calendar for the work to take place; only at that time will they will they change the status to "Planned". It's usually a pretty long haul to get the required votes, then to have the developers do their assessment and find time on their schedule, and then to get to that time and actually get the feature implemented. Typically that all takes many months, and often years — but sometimes you get lucky and it's something the developers have already had on their radar, and it gets implemented much more quickly.

For anyone reading this thread who would like to see this feature for locking old transactions to prevent accidental changes, you need to go to the top and add your vote in the yellow box.

Chris_QPW · May 2024

It seems to cause all kinds of issues related to inadvertant transaction duplication/modification.

Quicken Windows has the feature to "lock transactions before a certain date", but here is something that might not be obvious to people. That is for the user. Quicken can do anything it likes. In other words, such features are implemented at the user level, not at the lowest level like a true accounting software program would be required to do.

As such, it might not prevent the "duplication/modification" depending on what caused it. Example Quicken Windows has an ongoing bug where sometimes it changes the opening balance when it shouldn't. The transaction password doesn't stop that.

jacobs · May 2024

@Chris_QPW Well, we've seen over time that the Mac development team doesn't take features and copy them exactly from Quicken Windows. 😉 Some of that is simply due to the vast architectural differences between the two platforms, but some of it is that there is very intentional process of re-thinking about old features from Quicken Windows or the legacy Quicken Mac 2007 to see if they are needed, how they are used, and if they can be built to function better. So I would hope that if the Mac developers decide to lock old transactions from changing, they would do it in a useful and robust way — including not changing any "locked" transactions — which makes this a more complex feature request than it might at first seem.

What should Quicken do if the user has locked transactions for a fairly recent period, and a download from a financial institution into Quicken's Cloud servers creates a discrepancy with a locked desktop transaction? What should Quicken do if the bank balance downloaded from a financial institution differs from the sum of all transactions in the account in Quicken? What should Quicken do if security holdings in Quicken don't match what's downloaded from the financial institution? When placeholder transactions must be created, should they still be placed at the beginning of time, or on the first day after when transactions have been locked, making it potentially harder to find? There are solutions to all these and other issues; I'm only noting that what seems like a fairly straightforward feature request like this actually has many wrinkles which the developers need to identify, think through the best solution, and carefully implement.

In any case, unless this feature request garners more user support than the 7 votes it has received as of now, it's a moot point because it's likely not on the developers' radar.

Chris_QPW · May 2024

I really should have stated that as "I hope if they implement this, they don't make the same mistake as in the Windows version". 😉

Dean Sorenson · January 29

I'd like to cast my vote for a system to lock past year's transaction, which would prevent me from inadvertently mis-posting a transaction into a previous year…………….then spending parts of a couple days re-tracking my activity. To me, this would be a valuable improvement to software I truly appreciate and enjoy.

Sasulkey · January 29